Martucci: Piano Concerto No 1, Etc / Coggi, La Vecchia
Naxos
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May 26, 2009
MARTUCCI Piano Concerto No. 1.1 La canzone dei ricordi2 • Francesco La Vecchia, cond; Gesualdo Coggi (pn);1 Silvia Pasini (mez);2 Rome SO • NAXOS 8.570931 (67:53 Text, no Translation )
Giuseppe Martucci (1856–1909) was a forerunner to the so-called “generazione dell’ottanta” of composers (see Malipiero review elsewhere) that sought to initiate a new golden age of instrumental music in Italy to vie against the overwhelming dominance of opera. Most of those who would follow in his footsteps—and the list is long, including the likes of Casella, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Menotti, Pizzetti, Respighi, Rota, Wolf-Ferrari, and Zandonai—hedged their bets by playing both sides of the fence; but Martucci was unique for his time and place in that he wrote no operas whatsoever. Ironically though, in his role as a conductor, introducing Wagner’s operas to Italy may have done more to poison the well of Italian opera than any of his works as a composer did to stanch the opera rage. If you can’t lead the cattle away from the watering hole, do the next best thing: contaminate the water and kill them.
During his lifetime, Martucci was best known as a conductor, pianist, and teacher, Respighi being one of his more prominent students. His compositional output is not overly large, totaling fewer than 100 published opus numbers. Among them, however, are two symphonies, two piano concertos, two piano trios, a piano quintet, one sonata each for violin, cello, and organ, and a considerable volume of pieces for solo piano.
The current release—Volume 3 in Naxos’s complete survey of Martucci’s orchestral music—contains works that are not new to the recorded catalog. The Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor and La canzone dei ricordi were both coupled together, as here, in another Martucci survey a decade or so ago on the ASV label. The artists there were pianist Francesco Caramiello in the Concerto, soprano Rachel Yakar in the vocal work, and Francesco D’Avalos leading the Philharmonia Orchestra. That entire collection is now available in a super-budget four-disc set on Brilliant Classics. At about the same time that ASV was busy with their Martucci project, along came Sony with their release of the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B? Minor played by pianist Carlo Bruni, paired once again with La canzone dei ricordi, sung by Mirella Freni. The conductor and orchestra on that recording were Riccardo Muti and La Scala Philharmonic.
The good news is that I have the Freni/Muti CD, so I’m able to compare the Sony recording with the new Naxos. The bad news is that of the D’Avalos survey on ASV, I have only the two symphonies, but not the disc with the Piano Concerto; thus, I’m unable to compare Caramiello to Coggi. So let me begin with La canzone dei ricordi (“The Songs of Memories”), which seems to be one of Martucci’s more enduring works. As originally completed in 1887, the piece was conceived for mezzo-soprano and piano. It wasn’t until 11 years later (1898) that Martucci orchestrated it. The piece is a setting of seven poems by Rocco Pagliera. Unless one is fluent in Italian, Naxos’s printing of the texts in Italian only is highly frustrating. The Sony with Freni provides translations in English, French, and German.
The poems, as can be deduced from the work’s title, are about dreams recollected, mostly of longed-for, but alas, only imagined loves. More interesting are Martucci’s formal design and musical content. Each song ends in a different key from which it started. The song that follows it begins in the key in which the previous song ended. Thus, by the end, we have returned to the key and the poem with which the cycle began. Stylistically, Martucci’s indebtedness to Wagner is unmistakable, but it’s a Wagner tinted—some might say tainted—by some of Puccini’s more pastel orchestral touches that one hears in La bohème. Martucci undoubtedly knew the opera, which premiered in 1896, two years before his orchestration of La canzone dei ricordi.
Freni was 60 when she recorded the Martucci with Muti in 1995. Age had added a degree of weight to a soprano voice that in its youth was lighter and more lyric in character. I’m not suggesting she would have made a good Brunhilde, but her projection in these songs comes across as sounding more Wagnerian than does Silvia Pasini’s delivery on the new Naxos. Nor by any means is it just a matter of voice. Freni dispatches the cycle in just over 28 minutes, compared to Pasini’s drawn-out 33:50. The result is that Freni’s reading has tremendous dramatic thrust, frequently sounding like an agitated Brunhilde railing in high dudgeon against Wotan, while Pasini sounds more like Mimi in her “Mi chiamano Mimì” aria from La bohème.
If my description has led you to believe that I prefer Freni to Pasini in this song cycle, you’d be wrong. Martucci may have been a Wagner champion, but he was not Wagner; and Pagliera’s poems, to which Martucci set his music, are not about mythic warriors, heroes, and the downfall of the gods. They’re about dreams remembered in that half-conscious state of waking. Pasini, I believe, comes closer to capturing the more impressionistic character of the poetry and the music; and Francesco La Vecchia has under him in the Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma a better ensemble than Muti did at the time in his La Scala Philharmonic.
Since I have no other recordings of the Piano Concerto against which to compare Gesualdo Coggi’s performance, I can be brief. If you love big, Romantic piano concertos, Martucci’s D-Minor Concerto is right up there with some of the best of them. Echoes of Schumann, Grieg, and Brahms’s First Concerto (his Second hadn’t been completed yet when Martucci wrote his score in 1878) reverberate throughout the score, and maybe even a hint every now and then of Tchaikovsky (assuming Martucci had heard it in its original 1875 version prior to starting work on his own Concerto). Gorgeous music, gorgeous playing, gorgeous recording; this one is not to be missed.
FANFARE: Jerry Dubins
Martucci: Piano Concerto No 1, Etc / Coggi, La Vecchia
$19.99
CD
Naxos
May 26, 2009
8570931
Viktor Kosenko: Piano Music, Vol 1 - 11 Etudes / Shkoda
Toccata
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Oct 10, 2006
KOSENKO 11 Etudes in the Form of Old Dances, op. 19 • Natalya Shkoda (pn) • TOCCATA 36 (69:01)
Viktor Stempanovich Kosenko (1896–1938) trained at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied composition and theory with Mikhail Sokolov, a Rimsky-Korsakov pupil, and piano with Irina Miklashevskaya. His early years were hard, much as they certainly were for most other artists of his generation in a young Soviet Union. It wasn’t until 1929 that his employment prospects began to improve with a teaching position at Kiev’s Lysenko Institute of Music and Drama. In 1934, he accepted a post at the Kiev Conservatory, and in 1938, he received the Order of the Red Banner. With many concerts, a great deal of teaching, and a small number of published works to his credit, Kosenko died in his early forties of kidney cancer.
As for the Eleven Etudes, they fit into a genre of “olden style” pieces that reflected late 19th/early 20th-century nostalgia for a sentimentalized or nationalized 17th- or 18th-century past. A variety of composers tried their hand at this, including Grieg, Parry, Elgar, Giordano, Massenet, Reger, and Saint-Saëns, among others. Their works were never intended to be mistaken for period music, but were amiable stylizations that embedded thematic, harmonic, or contrapuntal devices in a generalized Romantic language, then poured the results into small-scaled Baroque or Classical dance forms.
Kosenko’s collection of gavottes, minuets, courantes, rigaudons, etc, fits perfectly into this group. It’s conventionally Romantic, with nothing evident of the olden style save in titles and a very occasional turn of phrase. Brahms, instead, is the main influence on Kosenko. Rhetorical devices and harmonic progressions occasionally point directly to specific pieces by the older master (the Sarabande in A Minor glances at Brahms’s Piano Concerto in D Minor), but the overall sense is of a composer finding his own creativity in the language of another, rather than simply as a Brahmsian manqué. The quality of the works varies, but at their best, they demonstrate some imagination, an idiomatic use of the instrument, and a good deal of charm.
Yet even if the music had no significant quality of its own, it would still be interesting because it had been composed at the end of the 1920s in the Soviet Union. This was a period unfriendly to traditional nationalists like Glière, much less composers who “whored after foreign gods.” (Fears of ideological contamination from abroad have a lengthy history in Russia, and the government there has always played this card successfully—much as governments have done elsewhere, but seldom with such ceaseless success.) Although the radicals of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians who briefly controlled the Soviet musical apparatus in the late 1920s were never as doctrinally unified as some musicologists believe, their repeated friendliness to Kosenko is surprising. Beginning in 1927, they invited the composer to give a concert of his music in Kharkov each year, for three consecutive years. Kosenko was also allowed to publish some of his music at that time, and his teaching position at the Lysenko Institute has already been mentioned. None of this would have been possible without RAPM intervention; yet these were the same people who urged the desertion of traditional classical structures for “revolutionary” ones, and the abandonment of the classical repertoire as bourgeois and formalistic. Perhaps RAPM’s Ukrainian branch was more ideologically flexible than its Russian one? The whole matter remains curious, and in need of greater elucidation through modern scholarship.
Natalya Shkoda’s thesis project for her Ph.D. earlier this year in piano performance at Arizona State University was a combination of this CD and a research paper on Kosenko’s op. 19. I hope the research paper went well, because the CD is an attractive testament to her current level of skill. She displays a solid technique and a convincing ability to modulate between the intimacy of such works as the Gavotte in B Minor (a lovely little thing, Brahms in an autumnal mood) and the ambitious, flashy Passacaglia. Her rhythmic sense is elastic, and her affection and knowledge of this music is obvious at every turn.
Sound quality is good and close, with fine presence along the full range of the instrument. Shkoda herself supplies the better than average notes. As this is marked volume 1, I assume more is on the way, and I sincerely look forward to hearing it, too.
FANFARE: Barry Brenesal
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Viktor Kosenko: Piano Music, Vol 1 - 11 Etudes / Shkoda
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Toccata
Oct 10, 2006
TOCC0036
Beethoven Recomposed / Coetzee, Laipang, Gilman, LGT Young Soloists
Naxos
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Nov 13, 2020
To mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, Russian born arranger Paul Struck has arranged two of the composer’s great mid-period chamber masterpieces for soloist and string ensemble. Expanding the sonorities of the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata – Beethoven’s most important chamber work for violin – allows the sonata’s concertante quality to emerge in a new light. The Cello Sonata No. 3 equally succeeds in conceiving the piano part for ensemble, while exploring fullness of sound and maintaining transparency of texture.
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Naxos
Nov 13, 2020
8579081
Berio: Sinfonia, Concerto for Two Pianos / Swingle Singers, New York Philharmonic
Sony Masterworks
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May 06, 2013
Prophets of the New is a series from Sony focusing on classic recordings of the 20th century's most revolutionary works.
"[Sinfonia] is a wild, four-movement work and shows the new direction music is taking. Gone are the strict constructions and parameters of serialism. Instead there is a concentration on pure sound... With the Swingle Singers grouped around microphones, breaking the language (French and English, mostly) into bits of sound components, and with the orchestra often blasting away with fortissimo chords that contained all 12 notes of the scale, there was not a dull moment anywhere... It is one of the musics of the future." -- Harold C. Schonberg, The New York Times
"...the Swingle Singers perform this music as if their lives depended on it. Sinfonia becomes a piece of musical theater on that recording..." -- Raymond Tuttle, www.classical.net
Berio: Sinfonia, Concerto for Two Pianos / Swingle Singers, New York Philharmonic
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Sony Masterworks
May 06, 2013
SONY49992
Symphonies No. 2, “Litanies of Love and Rain” & No. 3, “Ave Maris Stella” / Piano Concerto / Partita / Sonata for Violin and Organ / Vision / Songlines, Sun Dreaming
Naxos
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Apr 24, 2007
The young American composer Carson P. Cooman is one of the most active of his generation, having written over six hundred works in many forms. This disc presents a broad overview of his music, from orchestral to chamber and solo works.
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Symphonies No. 2, “Litanies of Love and Rain” & No. 3, “Ave Maris Stella” / Piano Concerto / Partita / Sonata for Violin and Organ / Vision / Songlines, Sun Dreaming
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Naxos
Apr 24, 2007
8559329
V2: WORKS FOR PIANO
Wergo
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Jan 01, 1994
Playing the piano was for Aaron Copland one of the necessities of life, like eating or breathing. Wherever he was there was always a piano somewhere near. Even during conversations and interviews, so it is said, his fingers used to move involuntarily on the table-top like on an imaginary keyboard. And it is in piano works that Copland's compositional development found it's culmination again and again. The "Passacaglia" is his very first large-scale work, and the 5"Piano Fantasy" can be regarded as his most ambitious, most extensive composition in the field of absolute music, a work in which he sums up and concentrates many characteristics of his musical style in a late work. American musician Nina Tichman has been particularly interested in contemporary compositions and their roots in traditional music for the piano. The music of Schönberg and Debussy, whose complete piano works she has presented cyclically (also released on the WERGO label), as well as that of contemporary American composers such as Copland and Elliott Carter, plays a central role in her repertoire.
V2: WORKS FOR PIANO
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Wergo
Jan 01, 1994
WER62122
Cage: Piano Works / Schleiermacher
Phil Harmonie
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May 28, 2021
In the last years of his life, John Cage wrote a great many so-called "Number Pieces" the title indicating the number of performing musicians. While most of these pieces indicate which instruments are to be played, as well as the sounds that are to be produced, other pieces offer only general tone descriptions or a framework for choosing the tones oneself. What these pieces do have in common is time\-organization: Cage designates the measure within which the tones must be played. Should one play these sound\-sequences within the interval quickly, then one must wait for the beginning of the next measure in order to continue; should one play with an even slowness, the separate intervals are joined without interruption. And so, each performance of the same piece is different: in one instance an even flow of sounds, in another a pulsation of rapid responses accompanied by pauses (including all variations). An exception is "Two²". Here the two pianists do not play according to a stopwatch, but rather by reacting to one another: Although the piece indicates measure, it does not assign tempo or even pulse. While both interpreters play independently of each other, they may continue on to the next measure only when the other player has finished his. Cage decided on the number of tones within a measure by drawing upon the rules of Renga, Japanese linked poetry, in which the number of syllables per verse are set at 5, 7, 5, 7, 7. As the pedal is continuously depressed, the notes sound into one another and this inner structure remains undetected.
Cage: Piano Works / Schleiermacher
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Phil Harmonie
May 28, 2021
PHIL06026
Weinberg: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 1
Grand Piano
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$19.99
Mar 27, 2012
The works on this first volume of the complete piano works of Mieczysowski range from very early yet characterful Mazurkas and the remarkably intense Lullaby, his Opus 1, to the at times dissonant Piano Sonata No 1.
Weinberg: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 1
$19.99
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Grand Piano
Mar 27, 2012
GP603
The Romantic Piano Concerto Vol 1 / Michael Ponti
Vox
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$29.99
Jan 01, 1992
Classical Music
The Romantic Piano Concerto Vol 1 / Michael Ponti
$29.99
CD
Vox
Jan 01, 1992
CDX-5064
Koželuch: Complete Keyboard Sonatas, Vol. 4
Grand Piano
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$19.99
May 12, 2015
A native of Bohemia, Leopold Kozeluch made his name in Vienna, a thriving musical center dubbed the land of the Clavier by Mozart. The sonatas in this volume all appeared in 1784, meeting the challenge of Mozart's popularity head-on. Kozeluch was singularly adept at producing what was considered the ideal fortepiano sonata of the time, his high reputation making him an influential supporter of a new instrument capable of accommodating the clarity, the delicacy, the light and shade he demanded in music.
Koželuch: Complete Keyboard Sonatas, Vol. 4
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Grand Piano
May 12, 2015
GP645
Kozeluch: Three Scottish Piano Trios / Trio 1790
CPO
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Jul 06, 2018
Leopold Kozeluch enjoyed such an outstanding reputation in 1781 that he received an offer from the Archbishop of Salzburg to succeed Mozart as court organist. Kozeluch’s piano trios must have been very popular since more than sixty of them appeared in print from 1781 to 1810. The three trios presented here were published in 1798 / 99 and had been preceded by forty other such works by him. The special feature of these three piano trios lies in his use of melodies from Scottish folk songs in their middle and last movements. Toward the end of the eighteenth century the Edinburgh publisher George Thomson had the idea to have Viennese classical composers set Scottish, Irish, and Welsh folk songs to music with an accompaniment for piano, violin, and violoncello and contacted Haydn, Kozeluch, Pleyel, and (later) Beethoven in the hope of winning them for this project. They gratefully accepted the offer and produced settings in rich supply – in Beethoven’s case alone, more than two hundred – that unfortunately are almost completely forgotten today. The works are presented here by Trio 1790, consisting of cellist and violist Imola Gombos, violinist Annette Wehnert, and pianist Harald Hoeren.
Kozeluch: Three Scottish Piano Trios / Trio 1790
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CPO
Jul 06, 2018
555035-2
Kozeluh: Sonatas For Fortepiano, Flute And Cello
Supraphon
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Jan 29, 2013
KOZELUH KNOBLOCHOVA; SEMERADOVA; FLEKOVA SONATAS FOR FORTEPIANO, FLUTE AND CELLO
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Supraphon
Jan 29, 2013
SU4106-2
Schumann: Piano Works
Piano Classics
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$21.99
Nov 01, 2019
'Domenico Codispoti plays with a warmth and fervor worthy of Cortot himself,' according to the veteran Gramophone piano critic Bryce Morrison. 'His sonority, too, has an Arrau-like fullness and richness.' Born in 1975, Codispoti has a growing discography of Romantic-era music including the piano works of Cesar Franck on Piano Classics (PCL0052): a 'most distinguished and enterprising recital' according to Gramophone, in which 'Codispoti gives us an impetus and virtuosity to set pulses racing.' Now he turns his attention to music from the other end of the Romantic era, composed by a figure even more significant in the history of the piano and pianists, Clara Wieck Schumann. A leading pianist of her day, the wife of one great composer and the intimate friend of another, Clara was also mother to eight children, a serious composer and a hugely influential teacher during the course of a career in the public eye spanning over 60 years. We may view Clara now as a strikingly independent woman, a woman of her time yet one who worked tirelessly against the grain of assumption and prejudice. It is right, therefore, that her art should be so celebrated 200 years after her birth in Leipzig. Her gifts as a creator that were much admired at the time, not only by her husband but by Franz Liszt, the greatest virtuoso of his day. It was Liszt who had created the modern concept of the solo piano recital in 1840, but he retired from performance soon afterwards, and Clara was the one who created the image of the modern pianist. On this new album, Codispoti performs a prodigiously accomplished set of Soirees Musicales, Op.6, published while Clara was still a teenager; the strikingly mature trio of Romances written before she turned 20; a G minor Sonata dating from the time just before and after her marriage to Robert; and finally the Variations on a theme by Robert which she composed to celebrate her husband's 42nd birthday in 1853. Thus, unlike many previous compilations of her music, Codispoti surveys her output in the round, and allows us to hear it mature even as she found herself given fewer and fewer opportunities to exercise her own creative gifts. With performances of tremendous sweep and conviction it makes for a highly persuasive introduction to Clara's music.
Schumann: Piano Works
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Piano Classics
Nov 01, 2019
PCL10193
The Balkan Piano, Vol. 1
Toccata
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Sep 20, 2024
The composing traditions of the nine Balkan countries are as good as unknown in the rest of the world. In this revelatory piano recital, the Albanian pianist Amir Xhakoviq presents a glittering array of keyboard jewels from his own country and it's neighbours, ranging from wild and energetic toccatas to timeless evocations of bells and other ancient traditions, with a surprisingly wide range of references, from folk-music to Scarlatti and jazz.
The Balkan Piano, Vol. 1
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Toccata
Sep 20, 2024
TOCN0034
Kouvaras: Complete Solo Piano Music & Chamber Music, Vol. 1
Toccata
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$15.99
May 17, 2024
As with many other Australian composers, the music of Linda Kouvaras (b. 1960) has a strong sense of wide-open spaces, expressed in lyrical, elegiac melodic lines that soar over freewheeling Lisztian piano textures and atmospheric echoes of French Impressionism. In this first album of a series presenting all of her instrumental works, chamber music, and songs written since 1991, she also addresses two major contemporary issues, with a duo for saxophone and piano exploring the human response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and a song-cycle confronting domestic violence from a woman’s viewpoint.
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Kouvaras: Complete Solo Piano Music & Chamber Music, Vol. 1
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Toccata
May 17, 2024
TOCC0729
Jaques-Dalcroze: Piano Music, Vol. 3 - Works for Piano Solo
Toccata
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Sep 06, 2019
The Swiss composer Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950) is best remembered for his development of Eurhythmics, which teaches the appreciation of music through movement. The buoyant miniatures recorded here document his fascination with dance, including a flirtation with jazz and ragtime, although the apparent innocence of the music conceals a striking degree of metrical and rhythmic complexity, cast in a style that owes something to Debussy and Fauré - animated by the blithe spirit of Chabrier. Xavier Parés, a native of Barcelona, and Patricia Seiffert, from Fribourg, in Switzerland, have their own concert careers but both also teach at the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze in Geneva.
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Jaques-Dalcroze: Piano Music, Vol. 3 - Works for Piano Solo
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Toccata
Sep 06, 2019
TOCC0540
V3: Complete Sonatas- Keyboard
Channel Classics
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Jan 01, 2006
Classical Music
V3: Complete Sonatas- Keyboard
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Channel Classics
Jan 01, 2006
CCSSA23606
Kozeluch: Piano Trios, Vol. 4
CPO
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$18.99
$13.99
Jul 12, 2024
For two decades, Cologne's TRIO 1790 has been dedicated to classical chamber music in general and the piano trios of Mozart's contemporary Leopold Kozeluch in particular. The result is a series of precious finds that do not lose any of their impact from the fine, slender tone of historically accurate instruments. On the contrary, they gain an unexpected wealth of subtle shadings and depth in the playful music of this inventive and versatile Bohemian. Again and again, the light-footed, distinctive sounds and lines are interspersed with dramatic flourishes that the attentive ear will recognise as the "modern music" of Ludwig van Beethoven, who came from Bonn on the Rhine to Vienna on the Danube to shake up the music world.
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CPO
Jul 12, 2024
555480-2
Prokofiev, Rimsky-Korsakov & Tsfasman: Works for Piano and Orchestra / Chochieva, Steffens, BBC SSO
Naïve
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$12.99
Nov 15, 2024
The pianist Zlata Chochieva is well known for creating unexpected associations. In "Chiaroscuro", her first album for naive (V7542, 2022), she had combined the worlds of Scriabin and Mozart, in whom she hears not only the same desire for clarity and weightlessness but also a similar poetic sense of rhetoric. Her next album ("i'm Freien", V7959, 2023), a homage to nature, revealed alongside Ravel's Miroirs and Schumann's Waldszenen a short cycle, so little known and graceful (Petite Histoire), by Felix Draeseke! No wonder she is now offering us, for her first album with orchestra, one of the most obscure works of Russian Romanticism, the Piano Concerto by Rimsky-Korsakov. Written in 1883 in memory of Franz Liszt, whose two opuses in the genre strongly influenced the author of Scheherazade, this Concerto, with it's monothematic structure, built on a Russian folk theme, had greatly impressed Balakirev, who was surprised to hear such an idiomatically written soloist part, from a composer who was not a pianist himself. At the age of fourteen, Zlata Chochieva had played the work under the direction of Mikhail Pletnev, then head of the Russian National Orchestra. This Concerto remains for her a "miracle of taste, poetry and inspiration". Her intelligent and limpid playing is ideally suited to the very delicate lyricism that Rimsky-Korsakov deploys throughout this astonishing score full of numerous and subtle contrasts. At the heart of this recording, where Zlata Chochieva is joined by the musicians of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the German conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens, surges the merciless ardor of Sergei Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto. In a departure from the stormy way in which this formidable score (for the fingers) is generally approached by pianists, Zlata Chochieva prefers a certain sense of phantasmagoria, rightly recalling that Prokofiev, as a spiritual disciple of Alexander Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, enjoyed stories, old Russian fairy tales and legends. After this, we have a total change of atmosphere with the Jazz Suite for piano and orchestra by Alexander Tsfasman which concludes the album. An eminent disciple of Felix Blumenfeld, an incredibly talented pianist, to whom Shostakovich intended piano part of one of his film scores, Tsfasman introduced American jazz to the Soviet Union, and formed the first orchestra dedicated to the genre. In Russia, he premiered Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin, a composer for whom he had the deepest admiration. A brilliantly written, comforting and sincere score, his Jazz Suite sometimes evokes the American composer but above all Hollywood and Soviet film scores. Not without a most contagious and mischievous pleasure, Zlata Chochieva and Karl-Heinz Steffens revel in it's ingenuous charms (Snowflakes). 17 July 2024
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Naïve
Nov 15, 2024
V8448
Debussy: Solo Piano Music Vol 1 / Peter Frankl
Vox
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$22.99
Jan 01, 1992
Debussy: Solo Piano Music, Vol. 1
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Debussy: Solo Piano Music Vol 1 / Peter Frankl
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Vox
Jan 01, 1992
CDX-5062
Pianorchestra
Ars Produktion
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Jan 01, 2013
Classical Music
Pianorchestra
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Ars Produktion
Jan 01, 2013
ARS38139
Schumann: Arrangements For Piano Duet Vol 1 / Eckerle Piano Duo
Naxos
Available as
CD
$19.99
$9.99
Oct 30, 2012
From the early 19th century up until the early 20th the piano was your home entertainment center, before radio and recordings were invented or widely available. This meant that if you wanted to check out Brahms’ new symphony or Verdi’s new opera, either you had to attend a live performance or play it on the piano, usually with friends or family members. This is why most orchestral, choral, operatic, and chamber works were disseminated in the form of four-hand piano arrangements.
As an avid duet player, Robert Schumann not only wrote delightful original pieces in this genre but also supervised four-hand arrangements of his works, although he created relatively few of these himself. At first Otto Dresel’s arrangement of the A major String Quartet Op. 41 No. 3 met with Schumann’s approval; nevertheless, the composer made revisions, adding slower metronome indications to better accommodate the piano’s extended register and sonority. In fact, Schumann listed this arrangement in his catalog of works. Here the Dresel/Schumann A major quartet receives its premiere recording as part of the first of a projected seven-disc survey of Schumann piano duet arrangements by the composer, his friends, and associates.
You can’t help but respect the Eckerle Piano Duo’s meticulously calibrated ensemble values and rhythmic exactitude, although a slightly faster second movement basic tempo might convey the composer’s agitato directive more effectively. Surprisingly, the Piano Quintet’s strong textural contrasts and sense of interplay between musicians loses very little in translation to the piano duet medium, possibly due to Clara Schumann’s intelligent balancing of registers and liberal yet discreet deployment of octave doublings.
By contrast, Theodor Kirchner’s transcription published by C. F. Peters is more conservatively laid out for two players, and consequently is less interesting to hear, although much easier to play. Again, the Eckerle Duo has worked out the balances, tempo relationships, dynamic scaling, and pedaling to an impressively polished degree; you’ll never hear the Scherzo’s ornaments so uniformly and accurately articulated, for example. At the same time, I prefer the shapely exuberance, supple playfulness, and conversational give and take that the Duo d’Accord brings to its Oehms Classics world-premiere recording. Piano-arrangement mavens considering this release may be further tempted by its excellent sound, plus Joachim Draheim’s well-written and informative booklet notes.
-- Jed Distler ClassicsToday.com
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Schumann: Arrangements For Piano Duet Vol 1 / Eckerle Piano Duo
$19.99
$9.99
CD
Naxos
Oct 30, 2012
8572877
Soprano Summit: Music for High Sax and Piano / Cohen, Anderson, Nester
Ravello Records
Available as
CD
$16.99
Feb 11, 2022
Ravello Records presents Soprano Summit from revered saxophonist Paul Cohen. Alongside his work as a performer, Cohen is known for his passionate scholarship, rediscovering long-forgotten saxophone works as well as arranging related music for the instrument. In this, his latest contribution, Cohen presents an album of music for the soprano saxophone in chamber and solo settings. The range and diversity of the soprano saxophone is stunning, from Cohen’s arrangement of Percy Grainger’s Arrival Platform Humlet (solo soprano saxophone) to Amanda Harberg’s first piece for saxophone, Feathers and Sax, (soprano saxophone and piano) and Jeff Scott’s new work The Gift of Life (piccolo, soprano/alto saxophone and piano). SOPRANO SUMMIT is both a celebration of the soprano saxophone as a concert instrument and a revelation of new, lost, revived, and beloved works.
Soprano Summit: Music for High Sax and Piano / Cohen, Anderson, Nester
$16.99
CD
Ravello Records
Feb 11, 2022
RR8062
Mozart: Keyboard Works
Naxos
Available as
CD
$19.99
Nov 28, 2025
Few musicians shaped the evolution of keyboard writing as profoundly as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His sonatas and concertos aligned technical brilliance with lyrical sensitivity to elevate the piano from largely domestic use to a powerful vehicle for solo and ensemble musicianship. This collection of hidden gems includes pieces spanning early childhood miniatures to complete sonata movements, minuets, a set of variations and a wide variety of incomplete works filled with Mozart's characteristic delicacy, surprise and operatic drama. Vijay Venkatesh's recording of Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 6 can be heard on a digital-only release, 9.70390.
Clara Schumann was one of the most famous of all 19th-century piano virtuosos, admired by contemporaries such as Liszt and Thalberg. Her piano works never succumb to stereotype and the Romances anticipate the sonority of Brahms' late music for piano. Her Variations, Op. 20 entwines Robert Schumann's themes with her own in music of touching intimacy. The Preludes and Fugues reflect Clara's love of Bach. This first volume of her complete music for solo piano is performed by the distinguished French pianist, Jean-Pierre Armengaud, who has written about Robert and Clara Schumann as well as having organised a symposium devoted to them.
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